


Diamond Dust (The Faceted Remix)

by arcapelago (arcanewinter)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Dreams, M/M, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-01 01:37:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15132245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/pseuds/arcapelago
Summary: It is only a few months after Erik escapes a second imprisonment amidst a ruined stadium and the betrayal of every mutant he still knows.  While a fugitive in Canada, Erik falls unconscious, and Charles travels to his side.  They can communicate only in his dreams.





	Diamond Dust (The Faceted Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fullmetalcarer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fullmetalcarer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Diamond Dust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10352220) by [Fullmetalcarer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fullmetalcarer/pseuds/Fullmetalcarer). 



Charles wheels himself into the hospital room with a heaviness that creaks the joints of his chair. In the relative stillness of visiting hours long ended, he doesn't look at first to the bed, though he listens to the workings of medical equipment and maybe the unaided breathing of the one they monitor.

They are in the northeast of Canada, the winter night deeper than anything ever known in Westchester. Heavy drapes are drawn over one small window, but its folds breathe with the draft and the thick pane rattles. Charles invites the cold to settle in his bones and waits to be numb. He is already numb, half of him. The serum has left him--left him in his natural state, though withdrawal racks him with uncontrolled emotion, with pain. With confusion, at times. With a power and a disability, changing places, sliding and colliding like the tectonic plates reshaping the distinct geography outside.

It is dangerous here for a defenseless mutant; more dangerous for a mutant fugitive. But Charles will not bring him home. Charles cannot look his medic--his student, his closest friend--in the eye and ask him to harbor the man who nearly killed him only short months ago, in a foolhardy show of power, or a fit of anger, or--what? Insanity? _Do you even understand what you did?_

Charles wheels closer to the window and draws back the curtain, letting the chill air and the light of the stars pool over him.

_What you tried to do to Raven._

_What you nearly did to me._

When Charles finally turns his face to the man in the bed he cannot guess the state of his own heart. There is so much grief, but for whom?

*****

Erik is pale under the dim lights. The head of his bed is inclined somewhat. Wires reach for his pulse, for his blood pressure, and a tube keeps him hydrated and fed, in a way. Perhaps there is something there for pain; Charles senses none. There are only dreams there beneath the surface.

Charles listens.

He listens as he watches Erik's chest rise and fall, as Erik's eyes are restless under his lids. He listens as he longs to reach over him and cover his nose and mouth, as he longs to brush back the hair grown just long enough to sweep his forehead.

Charles listens.

Eventually, he takes hold.

*****

Erik continues to dream. Charles reins him in, away from the memories of a traumatic past, memories that years ago he promised to bury, but which instead buried him. Charles brings him, still clothed in dreams, to the hospital room. He calls not to Erik, but to his unconscious self, who knows no deceit, and no design.

Erik opens his eyes. They are already focused on Charles, close at his side, leaning onto the bed from his chair like a friend. Like more.

"Where am I?" Erik asks, but he does not look around the room. Charles does for him.

"There was an accident," Charles answers. "Do you remember?"

Erik shakes his head, the movement hardly noticeable.

"That's all right," says Charles. "I'm here."

*****

Charles watches the ticking hand of the clock on the wall. It doesn't seem to go anywhere, pulsing in place like the withdrawal headache at his temples. He's been awake for a day, for two days. Erik dreams, but Charles cannot.

 _You and Erik sent me back, together,_ Logan told him. Logan, another near casualty; Logan, imparting the Word of God in that moment, when all of Charles' hard-won barriers fell down around him, and he realized how easy it still was to offer his heart to the slaughter.

"Do you still love me?" Charles asks.

Erik's eyes rest on him. There is no hurry. There is nothing outside of this room. There is nothing outside of this exchange.

"Yes."

"And Raven?"

"Yes."

"Then why do you hurt us?"

"I do what is necessary."

Charles' temper flares, but it only sparks a burn behind his eyes. "You're not supposed to--"

He bites his words away, pushing himself from the bed. He turns his chair to face the window. "I can't trust you, Erik. Don't you understand what that means?"

Through the window, the feeble light from the room illuminates snow falling past. Charles finds his calm in it. The quiet tones of the machines awaken to occupy the silence.

"Do you still love me?" Erik echoes.

Charles turns. He is drowsy. He is empty. Emptied out.

"I cannot trust you."

*****

"You said you'd never get inside my head again."

"'I do what is necessary,'" Charles mimics. Then he says, "I wanted it to hurt you when I said that." In the Pentagon, breaking a fugitive out of jail, Charles spared the time to be petty. "Did it?"

Erik doesn't answer. He doesn't know; the response, which he is obliged to give, is blank. Charles is disappointed but not surprised; there was so much activity after years of nothing. Did Erik believe he was dreaming, that day? That his long-imagined rescue, that his deliverance from that place, could not possibly be real?

"Why did you attack Hank?" Charles asks.

"I neutralized the obstruction."

"The _obstruction_ was your friend."

"Yes."

Charles studies Erik's face. He tries to understand. He wonders why he tries.

"The Sentinel would have killed him. You would have killed him."

"If necessary."

Charles closes his eyes.

" _Angel. Azazel. Emma. Banshee. All dead! Where were you, Charles? You were supposed to protect them!_ "

_I'm here. I'm here now._

*****

The machines count slow seconds, the sound curling through the air like smoke. He's fallen asleep again, has been falling asleep for a century in this room. He opens his eyes from the bed and sees the paint peeling from the ceiling. He looks to the side and sees himself slouched back in his chair. He starts awake.

*****

"Why am I here?" Erik asks him. Snow is still falling outside, but Charles can't see it.

"You're very ill," says Charles. "Do you remember?"

Erik doesn't.

"That's all right," says Charles.

*****

Charles wakes again at Erik's side. His back is stiff and sore from the chair; it feels good to lie down against the crisp white sheets. It feels good to press his shoulder against Erik's, to cover the back of his hand with his own. He used to lie in beds with Erik, as narrow as this one. Narrower, in the backseat of a car pulled off the highway, in the middle of a bright, warm day.

Beside him, Erik stirs. The beeping of the machines quickens, but only slightly, and Erik sits up smoothly as from the tomb and looks down at Charles.

Which of them is dreaming?

Are they both fully awake?

Erik lifts his hand from the far side of the bed, trailing wires across them both. He has just enough length to close his hand just under Charles' jaw.

"Why am I here?"

Erik wouldn't really do it, would he? Like this?

"Don't you remember?"

Real, or a dream, would he do it?

Erik's eyes are so hard in the yellow cast of the room's light.

The pressure of his hand increases tenfold.

Charles wakes up.

*****

The snow stops. For a while a sharp wind takes its place, whistling around the loose window and making Charles shiver, blanketless, across the seats of a couch he has found against the wall. But the wind, too, grows weak, and falls away.

Erik is sitting up in the bed. His hands remain at his sides. He is watching Charles where he has huddled himself into the corner of the threadbare cushions.

"Sing me to sleep," says Charles. "Tell me what happened."

"You used Cerebro to find me," Erik says. "You gave me a dream."

"A test," Charles offers. He does not rise. "Paris was so chaotic. We were rushed. Harried. You decided to take her life, yes, but there was no time to think. I gave you the time. I left the circumstances as they were, but I gave you a clear head."

Erik says nothing, but Charles remembers it, the room he had recreated, the long table where Raven lay defenseless. " _They will use her as the weapon that eradicates our kind._ " Erik asked him how soon. " _Very soon,_ " Charles answered.

"What did you do?"

"I shot her."

Charles remembers the sound of it, the final certainty of it, and it chills him where the frigid room hasn't managed to reach him yet. But Charles hadn't been finished. The test wasn't complete.

" _There's been a mistake,_ " Charles said. " _It's me. I'm the one._ "

"Then I shot you."

"Yes." Cleanly, this time. And not just a coin.

Charles closes his eyes. His headache has collapsed to that fiery point above his brow. It's the acknowledgment of a truth: that all it will take is the suggestion, the notion--unverified and untested--that something bigger can be gained through the loss of something smaller, and any one of them will be sacrificed for that cause. Erik is their enemy. Erik cannot be redeemed.

Logan said they sent him back together, but that was a different future. A future they've prevented. It means nothing now.

"Is that why I'm here?" Erik asks. "A new prison?"

Charles sighs. He finally sits up, pushing himself upright with more effort than it's ever taken him.

"You're here because the last thing you did was turn the gun on yourself. Romantic, to be sure, but a risky thing to do in a dream. You won't wake up without help."

If Charles expects Erik to grow alarmed, to grow defensive, he doesn't.

"Then you win," he reasons. "It would be foolish to let me go."

Charles transfers himself into his chair. Erik watches him calmly.

"I'm afraid you're right," answers Charles.

Around them, the walls are no longer hospital white, but yellowed and peeling wallpaper. A lamp burns next to Erik's cot, and a small, drafty window continues to let in the northern cold. Erik hid himself well here in this abandoned place. There is no danger of anyone else finding him.

Hank is waiting for Charles on the road. Even if the pathway were cleared, Charles doesn't think he would have the strength to push the wheels of his chair forward any more. He is carried, and he does not care. As the boot is shut over his folded chair, dislodging drifts of snow from the car windows, Charles watches the small hunting lodge as it grows smaller and finally disappears behind a tree line. The tire chains crunch and groan over the sound of the struggling heater. They are on their way to the tiny airport.

"Everything all right?" Hank finally asks, nervously, only when he has settled Charles into his seat in the small plane. The window at Charles' side has recently been wiped clean, and the night is clear. Were it not for the trees, were it not for the jutting hills, perhaps Charles could see the decrepit little house where Erik lies alone.

"Lucky for him, I am a fool," whispers Charles. The propellers of the plane begin to pull them around, and Charles turns in his seat, to face the lodge, to send a powerful signal over the distance, a shout to mobilize, to awaken.

The plane hauls itself with increasing speed across the black, de-iced asphalt, until with a final peal of diesel and effort it is airborne.

The varied wilderness of Labrador recedes behind them. So does any assurance of safety, of peace.

"I'm sorry," Charles says. He looks across the cabin at Hank, who shrugs.

"Don't be."


End file.
